Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  Jealousy entered into it too: although Gris never wavered in his devotion to Cubism he became very much attached to Matisse; and more than that, Gertrude Stein became very much attached to Gris. “Tell me why you stand up for his work, you know you do not like it,” said Picasso to Gertrude Stein, and she says he said it “violently.” She also observes, “Gris was the only person Picasso wished away. The relationship between them was just that.” And to Kahnweiler he said, “You know very well that Gris never painted any important pictures.”

  But this was later. In 1913 Picasso’s natural kindness still far outweighed his irritation, and Juan Gris was one of the group at Céret.

  Picasso was installed in some splendor on the ground floor of a big eighteenth-century house, once a monastery, belonging to Frank Havilland, a china-manufacturer from Limoges with artistic tastes, who also frequented the Steins and the Bateau-Lavoir. The house had a large garden with a stream in it and a great many trees: the stream was filled with frogs, the trees with nightingales; and between them they made Max Jacob wretched. But it would have taken more than a choir of nightingales to disturb Picasso; he was working extremely hard and he went on working, although while he was at Céret he received the news of Don José’s death. Céret is less than a hundred miles from Barcelona; Picasso was no longer poor; he did not go. Although he feared and hated death he buried Eva, he buried Juan Gris, Vollard, and other friends; but he did not bury his father. It was not that he was unable to go to Spain, since his friends had hardly arrived before he took them over the border to see a bull-fight at Figueras. There is no hint of an explanation in anything that Picasso said in later years; none in the letters that Jacob wrote to Apollinaire at the time. All that can be gathered from Jacob’s correspondence is that they were deeply concerned about the news; that Picasso was very kind to him; that the weather was indifferent; that he found Eva charming; and that she was far from well.

  Few things are easier than clapping labels on to Picasso’s more usual subjects and saying, “The bull symbolizes evil,” or, “The bull stands for the Spanish people,” or, “The café tables symbolize Bohemia, the refusal of ordinary bourgeois life,” and so on: it made him extremely impatient—“One simply paints,” he said, “one does not paste one’s ideas on a picture.” Yet is it entirely fortuitous that at the time of Don José’s death the harlequin found his way back into Picasso’s painting? The harlequin, not as a symbol but as the evidence of a certain state of mind in which loneliness was an important factor?

  He did not entirely vanish with the ending of the Rose Period; there is for example a sad Cubist harlequin of 1909, leaning his head on his hand; but it was not until this holiday at Céret in 1913 that Picasso painted another important member of the long series. It is not an easily legible picture: high Cubism, rigidly disciplined and as impersonal as anything of Picasso’s can be impersonal, pale buff and gray, more analytic than synthetic. But it is the old harlequin, Picasso’s companion, to whom he had sometimes given his own face.

  A point of departure for this picture is obvious, perhaps too obvious to be altogether convincing: not only does Max Jacob record their journey across the frontier in “the charming company of cooks, engineers, and courteous draper’s assistants” to Spain, “a land of squares and angles” where “the houses have no roofs and the aloes are as bitter as the people,” but he also speaks of their meeting with a small traveling circus and making friends with the girls and the clowns “whose make-up might have been a Cubist joke.”

  The summer was wet, cold, and disappointing; a southern town, made for the sun, is even more dismal than the north when rain falls steadily; and nothing is more uncomfortable than walking about in wet rope-soled shoes. Eva’s cough grew worse, and she was thought to have bronchitis.

  In spite of the weather Picasso worked steadily: he and Braque carried the technique of papier collé much farther—it had greater potentialities than they had supposed, and Braque painted his splended “Clarinette,” one of the finest papiers collés yet produced—and between them they established Cubism firmly on its synthetic basis.

  They were back in Paris as usual for the Salon d’Automne, and it was in Paris that Picasso painted two large pictures of particular significance, the one as it were summing up the recent past and the other looking towards the future. The first is the “Joueurs de cartes,” in which restrained color builds the broad unrelieved planes into a whole that possesses a relief of its own, a relief helped not by a cut-out paper imitation of a printed pattern but by a painted imitation of that imitation. It is true that the “Joueurs” also foreshadows a technique that he was to use far more extensively next summer, a kind of pointillism here confined to a small area in the middle, but it is the second painting that shows the full returning tide of color and gives a hint of the strange worlds beyond the limit of Cubism. He knew that it would be an important work, and he made several preliminary sketches, one at least in color: the resulting picture is called “Femme en chemise, assise dans un fauteuil,” and it is as rounded as an egg.

  As it is shown in his painting, Picasso’s feeling for women oscillated between extreme tenderness and appreciation on the one hand and violent hatred on the other, the mid-point being nearer dislike if not contempt. The “Demoiselles d’Avignon” is often held up as an example of the second, and although because of the particular nature of that picture I think this is a mistake, there are plenty of other, and unquestionable, examples of his savagery; but while he was with Eva there was nothing to exacerbate his misogyny, and the “Femme en chemise” is quite benign. Superficially the picture is not at all difficult: the beautifully sunburned woman sits there in a fringed, upholstered easy chair, her columnar body bare to the navel, her shift in her lap (it looks like a crumpled papier collé), one arm behind her head, a newspaper in her other hand. The general color of the figure and the background is golden-tawny; the padded, enveloping chair is a varying magenta; and the whole picture is warm. It is also an immediately striking piece of work, especially when it is compared with the austere pictures that preceded it; it astonishes the beholder and haunts his memory.

  “I am thinking about that famous picture of Picasso’s, ‘La Femme en chemise,’” said Paul Eluard, “a picture that I have known for close on twenty years and that has always seemed to me both so perfectly simple and so extraordinary. The vast and sculptural mass of the woman in her armchair, that head as big as the sphinx’s, those breasts nailed to her chest, form a marvelous contrast—and is something that neither the Egyptians nor the Greeks nor any artist before Picasso could bring into existence—with her small-featured face, the waving hair, the delectable armpit, the jutting ribs, the filmy slip, the soft easy chair, the daily paper.”

  In Picasso’s work a theme is often announced, apparently forgotten, and then much later taken up again for full development: the promise of the “Femme en chemise” was not fulfilled for many years. Having painted her, Picasso returned to the main current of his Cubist pictures and to his constructions. These objects now took on a more sculptural aspect, as though his view of their nature changed, as though they were no longer collages raised to a higher power but rather creations in their own right. And indeed the series runs from the almost flat “Violon” of 1912 or 1913, which is essentially a collage, to the free-standing “Verre d’Absinthe” of 1914, which is true sculpture by any definition.

  Most of them are concerned with stringed instruments, though there are also a few still-lives; and in making them he used some of the resources of African and Romanesque art in which positive and negative are interchangeable, a hollow standing for a bulge or a protruding cylinder for a hole. In some, color or drawing plays an important part; in others the materials are bare; and these materials include paper, string, sheet-metal, cardboard, and wood.

  An eminent authority says that if Picasso “had done nothing else, his place as a master in the history of sculpture would have been ensured,” and no doubt for an art-historian that is tru
e. Yet why are so many people disappointed by his constructions? Partly because they are clumsily botched together, which offends the general respect for craftsmanship: arts and crafts, or rather the craft through which art finds its expression, are not easily separated, and evident manual dexterity is often taken as a sign that the artist was capable of saying what he meant to say. And partly because many of the constructions are now bent, faded, limp, dirty, and falling to pieces. In the first place they were gay, as the drawings prove: and in the first place Manolo’s carved butter was no doubt as satisfying as his later stone or terra-cotta; but no one will pretend that the melting butter was worth more than its dairy price. Many materials grow sad with age, as sad as the “real” skirts on Degas’ dancers, once so white and crisp; and that is where the comparative failure of the construction lies, for they came fresh and happy from Picasso’s hand—an uncharacteristic happiness was the mark of 1913 and early 1914—and apart from a few examples such as the cheerful, and permanent, polychrome bronze absinthe-glass neither the happiness nor the freshness has survived. We are not looking at what Picasso saw. Permanence may have nothing to do with artistic expression, in the first place, but it certainly has to do with subsequent appreciation.

  Why did Picasso choose to botch these things together? It has been suggested that he loved the rough surfaces. Maybe so: but it looks more like one of those many contradictions that made up his difficult character, for at other times he could be a most finished craftsman. His painting, etching, and engraving are professional to the highest degree; even his imitation wood-graining, the house-painter’s technique that he learned from Braque and that they used in so many Cubist pictures, is the work of a conscientious artisan; in 1905 he worked an accomplished low relief in copper, and in the fifties he made a gold necklace for a friend to wear at bull-fights. I had it heavy in my hands a little while ago and I looked at it very carefully: first there is a great solid round, two or three inches across, with a bull’s head in very high relief in the middle of it; then on either side roughly triangular lumps of gold, each having another bull’s head, but in profile and either incised or in low relief; then at the ends, well before the clasp, two gold leaves; and throughout the necklace the links are bull’s bones. Quite apart from its artistic excellence the craftsmanship is of the highest order: no working goldsmith could have done better. Yet the only technical guidance he had was from the dentist at Vallauris: his innate dexterity and feeling for materials did the rest.

  The year 1914 opened as a happy year for Picasso, and this happiness bubbled out in color. All at once the sobriety of Cubism was overwhelmed with a copious shower of brilliant dots: soft curves came back, the remaining rectilinear forms were brightly colored, and a joyful green, a rare color for Picasso, made its appearance. The severely-disciplined compositions gave way to less ambitious merriment; the austere planes to a profusion of these dots. They were not the intellectual, scientific dots of pure color that Seurat used, but rather an expression of gaiety and a means of making the variegated surface dance. And so strong was the influence of Picasso’s mood on his friends that even the sober Braque began to paint in this rococo form of Cubism, although it seemed foreign to his nature.

  Friendship was of the first importance to Picasso, young and old. In 1914 Kahnweiler brought out another of Max Jacob’s books, he Siege de Jerusalem, illustrated once again with Picasso etchings, and its kind reception brought still more pleasure to them both. Apollinaire was also doing well: Alcools was a success, and apart from that he was now running the influential Soirées de Paris, a review that supported the avant-garde in spite of its readers’ resistance—when he published five pictures of Picasso’s constructions thirty-nine canceled their subscriptions. And then when La Peau de 1’Ours, a collectors’ club founded by Andre Level and his friends in 1904 with the idea of buying pictures, enjoying them for a while, and then parting with them, held their sale in March, 1914, Picasso’s “Famille de Saltimbanques” came up for auction: they had given Picasso a thousand francs for it, a sum that terrified collectors in 1908. All his friends were there, and in an atmosphere of intense excitement the bidding rose steadily from the respectable to the surprising and then to the spectacular, closing amidst wild cheers from one and all at the figure of 11,500 francs. Neither in Montmartre nor in Montparnasse does there appear to have been any jealousy, any envious repining, though almost all the painters were poor and few of them were saints. It is true that Picasso did not touch a single sou of this sum; but even so it was a commercial consecration, not without its importance or its joy. It was prophetic too: when that Picasso came up for sale again in the States it fetched over a million dollars.

  Then again the “Gioconda” was back in the Louvre: Italy had restored her to France, the name of the real culprit was known—Peruggia, an Italian—and Picasso could take a cab without looking behind him, or a train.

  This summer of 1914 he spent in Avignon with Eva, and the Braques and Derains joined them there. Braque and Picasso still formed a most united team, although their painting was now more distinct than it had been a year or so before, since the grave Braque did not follow Picasso in all his gambolings; but Derain had moved right away from Cubism to a somber manner of his own, called by some his Gothic period, a divergence that neither altered Picasso’s liking for Derain nor affected his ebullient cheerfulness.

  All the survivors agree that it was a golden summer, and figures prove that this was not mere nostalgia for an exciting, adventurous, forward-looking, comparatively simple and happy world. The paintings accumulated in Picasso’s studio, among them another “Ma Jolie,” with the words, sworn evidence of his happiness, stenciled large and plain across the top, the brilliant “Portrait d’une jeune fille,” and several kaleidoscopic still-lives.

  But even so apolitical an animal as Picasso must have heard the rumbling of guns as the summer wore on. He began to paint the picture that is generally called “Vive la France,” a colorful still-life of a bottle of rum, some café objects—playing cards, a packet of tobacco, jars, a spotted glass—against a background of flowered wallpaper, another imitation papier collé: one of the vessels, perhaps an opaline jar, has the words “vive la” above crossed tricolors, and it is said that there is a relation of cause and effect between the coming war and the picture. The painting is as cheerful as can be; but the story may be true. Picasso may have been expressing his support for France, or he may have been conjuring fate.

  If the picture was intended as an exorcism, it failed. In any case it was too late. Before he had finished it the whole wretched mindless process of destruction had begun, and his friends left to joint their regiments. “I took Braque and Derain to the station at Avignon,” he said. “I never found them again”: perhaps the saddest words he ever spoke.

  Chapter X

  IN the enormous all-pervading excitement, the sense of ultimate crisis, the patriotic enthusiasm, the regiments marching with flowers in their rifles, the beating of the drum, personal unhappiness was difficult to realize at first; but soon it became clear that this total disruption applied not only to daily life but to the entire pattern underlying that life.

  War had been declared amid a tidal-wave of national feeling in which the longing for revenge played an important part; and in the moment of extreme danger, when the German drive through neutral Belgium brought the enemy to the Marne in the first days of September, not twenty miles from the heart of Paris, the nation’s spirit rose to the highest pitch, in spite of the government’s flight to Bordeaux. The Germans were halted, though at a terrible cost in lives; the peril brought the French together as a single body; and in the exalting, unifying hatred for the enemy the old divisions vanished. The Socialist, Communist, and anarchist doctrine that workers would not fire upon their comrades did not apply to German workers. Foreigners, unless they were the allies of France, were of no importance whatsoever; they did not count.

  Picasso was an outsider once again. The world that had grown up around
him and in which he belonged evaporated in the first few weeks of the war. His French contemporaries disappeared, and he was left with a sparse remnant of his wide acquaintance—other foreigners, old men, and invalids—the remote spectator of a quarrel that was not his own.

  His temperament was that of an outsider: but no temperament is all of a piece—Picasso’s less than most—and just as celibates often dream of the marriage state, imagining strange joys, so some part of the outsider longs at times for integration. The rootless Polish-Italian Apollinaire, a weaker but perhaps a happier man, solved his problem by joining the French army: there was some difficulty at first, possibly because of the statues, but by the end of the year he was a gunner, an integral part of the 38th regiment of field artillery. Picasso did no such thing. Although his general sympathies were plain, he was not viscerally concerned by the battle between France and Germany; for him the 1914 war, as opposed to the wars against fascism, was not a conflict between light and darkness in which he was necessarily committed. Yet he was deeply affected, and not merely by the inconveniences of life for a foreigner, the papers, the necessity for a passport, the bureaucratic fuss, and the inevitable shortages; no civilian is entirely at ease among fighting-men in time of war; his self-esteem is diminished, and women no longer have the same regard for him. In his case it also brought loneliness; the darkened streets of Paris were empty of young men, apart from a few in uniform; and although the Montparnasse cafés such as the Dôme and the Rotonde still had their customers, not many of them were people he liked. Most of his friends had been called up or had volunteered: others were abroad, Picabia in the United States, where he was soon joined by Duchamp; Delaunay in Spain, which also sheltered Marie Laurencin and the German she had so absurdly married just before the war: even Gertrude Stein was pinned in England, there being no transport for neutrals in the early days.